Month: September 2016

A Touch-and-Feel Guide to the BritishMuseum

by Tess Tabak

At the BritishMuseum in London, many of the world’s greatest treasures are on display. As I studied the Rosetta Stone, one of our modern-day wonders, there was only one thing on my mind: What does that feel like?

Fortunately, the BritishMuseum anticipated that desire. They recently started hosting Objects Handling Sessions, where visitors can touch historic artefacts daily under supervision of a trained volunteer. They’ve also added an interactive Touching Tour, which allows blind visitors to handle plaster replicas of some of the artwork, to better visualize it. These features can help bring history to life in your fingertips.

Indeed, the guards seemed blind to it. Pictured below, a woman rests on an ancient statue marked PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH.

Encouraged, I partook myself. Here is a guide to my favorite sites at the BritishMuseum by taste and texture.

1) The Sphinx

The Sphinx tasted enigmatic. Truly, there is nothing in the world like the feel of a genuine Egyptian sphinx beneath your tongue. Each lick imbued me with years of wisdom.

On the downside, I probably have a curse now.

2) The coin room

The coin room in the BritishMuseum has a handful of coins out at all times to be handled. Naturally I popped a few in my pocket when no one was looking.

I felt supremely powerful holding the coins of generations past. However, I discovered that the thousand-year-old drachmas, though purportedly valuable, could not buy me a snack from the museum’s cafeteria. Whoops. Now I know what people in Greece feel like.

3) Napoleon’s bed

Comfy, but short.

4) The Mummy

“I know what you did to the Sphinx,” a voice whispered in my ear as I stroked the Mummy’s hand. Whoa. I’ve really got to get out of here.

Why does every girl I know have a story about an eating disorder that she may

or may not have had growing up?

And now that we are all grown up, why can’t we eat without apologizing?

Why can’t we go a day with weighing ourselves and wondering?

Why does that voice in our heads never let up?

“You fat piece of shit you are nothing.”

So here’s to the all the girls who still feel fat all the time even though they are nothing but skin and bones.

And here’s to the girls who still feel fat all the time even though they are anything but skin and bones.

And here’s to the girls who drink every night to quiet the voice inside.

And here’s to the girls who slice their skin just trying to get by.

And here’s to the girls on juice fasts, and low carb diets, and diet pills.

And here’s to the girls who are tired of the world weighing down on them.

Let me be the voice inside your head.

I don’t care if you are beautiful or smart or kind or nice or caring or thin or fat or mean or bossy.

I don’t care if you like to pay dirty and I don’t care whether you keep your legs closed tight.

You are everything i’ve ever wanted to be, just the way you are.

I wish I could take my own advice but the least I can do is impart it to you.

Fuck that voice in your head.

Fuck it hard like that guy that you met at a party and fucked on ecstasy then never called

back the next morning.

Fuck it and don’t ever call it back.

Don’t ever invite it back in.

POETRY

you told me that you liked my poetry so

I got drunk and wrote a thousand poems about

the faces you make when you’re trying to make a point

and the sound of the train rolling by at night

and I wrote a devotional ode to cheese fries

and a villanelle about the sunrise

and I wrote about last night at the bar

and the night before

and watching movies in my parent’s basement

and living alone in my old apartment

and I wrote a sonnet about the time that her and I

hooked up in the back seat of my car

and how I realized girl on girl was better than I had ever expected

and I wrote about the trees and the mountains

even though there are no mountains

and I wrote about the sea and the shore but not the beach

because I hate the beach

and I wrote a pantoum just for you

about how much I hate the feeling of dry sand

and the sound of chalkboards

and I wrote about the other things that make my skin crawl

and I wrote an epic poem about our love which isn’t love at all

and I wrote about dead bodies floating in the river

and snow accumulating on my dashboard

and dead leaves crunching under my feet in the winter

and I read you a few of my poems about

spring making its way and

the rain on my fingertips on a warm day and

the ways I want you to hold me

and you told me that you didn’t like my poetry so

I got drunk and deleted them all

all ten thousand of them

one by one

BLUMEN

every poem i read seems to have a line about

chrysanthemums

but i cannot picture them in my head because

i don’t know much about flowers and

i wouldn’t know a chrysanthemum if it

bought me a drink and sang me love poetry

in german can’t you hear it sing

Chrysantheme

I know only dandelions

der Löwenzahn

sie blühen draußen

in the back yard

little yellow heads that pop up

übernacht

when the spring comes

and fade to soft greys

i make a wish and blow them away

but my wishes never come true

and i know roses

die Rose

blooming on my arm in shades of

red and black and grey

Man muss Tattoos nicht gießen

they thrive on the water in my body

the body is made up of so much water

we are like sacks of seas

das Meer fließt

and i know hibiscus

der Eibisch

floating in wine that my sister let me sip

when i was sixteen and we were

close like we were before

before everything changed

when were were like real Schwestern

es schmeckt suß wie Schokolade

and i know that lavender

der Lavendel

is calming so they put it in soaps and teas

and in the south of france my mom bought

so much lavender soap to take home

and scrub our hands clean with

and there’s still some in the powder room

which is just a fancy Badezimmer

that only the guests get to pee in

and i know tulips

die Tulpe

my mom’s favorite flower

wir pflanzen sie im Frühlig

in the front yard

i saw them everywhere in amsterdam

at the flower market

did you know that the netherlands

suffered something akin to the great depression

hundreds of years ago

when the price of a tulip bulb kept rising

until someone realized they were just flowers

and i’ve seen a sunflower

die Sonnenblume

towering over me in a garden as i

walked the streets of my mom’s home town

back in germany

so gross

so schôn

it struck awe in me like a chrysanthemum never could

and i couldn’t help but wonder to myself

who no one writes poems about

the price of a tulip bulb or

lavender soaps from the south of France or

hibiscus wine secrets shared between sisters or

tattoos of garden variety roses or

making a wish on a dandelion

I couldn’t help but wonder to myself

why no one writes poems about sunflowers

standing tall in the garden and striking awe in all of us

WANTING TO SHOOT UP AGAIN, LIKE, ALL THE TIME, BUT NOT REALLY

I tied a kite string around the sun to try and capture its wave lengths.

I didn’t crave the heat so much as I wanted to catch a tan.

My skin is paler than the moonlight by the middle of winter.

I can trace every vein from wrist to finger.

The blue green angels singing, begging me to puncture.

When I get my blood drawn at the doctor’s office

I lay out my arm and place my finger on the spot

“This is the vein you want.”

This is the vein that is full of life and bounty.

They always cringe at me as if I know too much.

And I do know too much.

When I meet someone new in a sleeveless top all I can see

is their pretty veins.

The blue green angels singing, begging me to puncture.

“You have beautiful veins and lovely bones,”

I told my friend that as I ran my fingertips up and down and his arm and

traced his collar bone.

“Thats the creepiest thing you’ve ever said.”

I used to thread my veins together with medical needles.

I’d knit them into long scarves and try a different spot every time to

prevent the formation of track marks.

They littered my friends’ skin like cigarette butts on the ground at the park.

I kept them away but my inner arms would be bruised for days from

poking around.

And I once got an abscess the size of a golf ball from dirty needles or sharing needles.

Or maybe from sharing dirty needles.

In the emergency room they refused to drain it

my little ball of puss and blood.

They gave me an antibiotic and no other instructions other than to

STOP.

“Stop living your dirty lifestyle, much worse things will happen,

you rotten junkie, you.”

I still have a scar from when they finally did drain it.

It’s the only scar I don’t plan to cover up with tattoos.

Because I need to remember, when my veins look so enticing,

when your veins look so enticing,

that it wasn’t all good.

I need something to remind me when

the blue green angels are singing, begging me to puncture.

Because the body has memories.

And the body can’t remember pain the way it remembers the good.

I need the sun to bronze me and cover every last inch of the blue green

so that I can stop staring and wishing and remembering.

So that I can stop tracing the lines and remembering the good times.

Instead I want to trace the line of the little scar on my arm

and remember when it hurt.

Because if you forget the pain

history is sure to repeat itself.

Anna Shapiro is an English major at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. After graduating, she hopes to get her MFA in creative writing. Anna lives at home with her family, frog-in-a-jar, and plastic cat skeleton. When not writing poetry, she can be found implementing her feminist agenda and drinking craft beer on draft.

A CHILDLESS DREAM

See the spectral blaze of a child’s silhouette seared against the plaster.Sound waves of laughter take shape into that of a hum drumming through my body, no ponderous force pulling me down the center. Her phantom bore a hole through me.Pink fractals sprout throughout my skin. The longing has gone, disintegrated into the brackish water that’s extinguished the flames of need. I no longer sense the urgency in my womb. She’s just a faint memory of want, an etching fading from erosion.

INSOMNIA

I ruminate about the past and future, in a world that subsists in the present, spinning in a cyclical existence. Stories form creases across the folds of wan, scarred skin. My clothes are torn and faded. Dressed like a vagrant, I let words slip out from my mind, down through my fingers, and onto the typewriter. Indelible memories flow out in ink. Into the night, my head nods as sleep beckons, a miasma of cigarette smoke and ash hangs. A nicotine halowreaths me. Disgruntled drones wake carrying off to work in a sleep medicinal daze. I am the stupor filling in the fractures of their skulls. Dusk has long passed and dawn sneaks its way across stretches of moonbeams over the landscape of my psyche. I yawn, fanning my face with scribbled pages in the heat. Show me it’s time to lay my head, my world upon a strained neck, down on my pillow to greet the escape of slumber.

Dear readers,

Although the leaves have not yet turned, the time has come once again for the Furious Gazelle’s annual Halloween contest. Send us something haunting, grotesque, pumpkin-themed, etc. and you could win a $50 cash prize and a book in the genre of your choosing. The top contenders will all be published on our site with the winner being announced on Halloween. Only one gets the coveted book and prize.

We accept all forms of writing for this contest, including essay, fiction, humor and poetry. Please follow our normal submission guidelines for entries, and look at our last year’s finalists for an idea of what we are looking for. The only rule is that this is a Halloween contest so your piece(s) should reflect that in whatever way you deem Halloween-ish.

That’s right, piece(s)! We will accept up to five submissions from each contestant. There is no fee to enter. Please send your submissions to submit@thefuriousgazelle.com with Halloween Contest Submission in the subject line of your email. The Deadline is Wednesday October 26, 2016 11:59pm EST.